The Casual Pen-and-Paper Gamer

This is the new battleground. The casual pen-and-paper gamer.

They are by definition exclusively new players too, drawn in from the world of video games, MMOs, cell phone games, Youtube, tablets, and other places. Forget the hardcore - they are already playing and bought-in, the profits and future customers of the roleplaying depend on new players.

Every industry chases 'the new player' and you even see legacy MMOs in decline trying to reinvent themselves to attract a new player base. This is where World of Warcraft is right now, a declining (but mature) hobby struggling to reinvent itself for that large group of casual players out there with little time to invest and who frankly aren't sold on the idea of logging to a faction grind in every day.

World of Warcraft's problem is essentially Zynga's with Farmville and Mafia Wars - how do you make a game interesting to play when it is essentially a game of "who gets bigger numbers?" Granted in each those 'numbers' turn out to be little pieces of gear, new critters for the farm, or a bigger number to bonk other players over the head with - but they are numbers hidden by 3d graphics, achievements, pets, or other virtual representations. Sometimes they are just numbers, like stamina or the endless faction reputation values in WoW.

Numbers are not cool.

Social, right? Our game is a social experience! World of Warcraft was like that for a while, you played because that's where everybody else was, but social is never a reason to play something when no one is playing, it's fire without fuel. Social can amplify a game's popularity, but you can't sell people on social in a barren desert. Unless you are Las Vegas, but that's only been done once.

So the casual player, that incredibly large mass of players out there with nothing else better to do than wait to play your game. Right? You have to answer the question, why should they? D&D 5, Pathfinder Beginner Box, or Five Moons, why play? What makes this as 'pick up and play' as the next Angry Birds? What makes this game so cool I will sit and watch people play it endlessly on Youtube? Look at your game. Is it really that casual? Is it really that fun? What screams at people and engages them? What makes this game so fun that you have to play it, or even watch people play it?

If your answer is "we have better numbers" you are not thinking it right.

There is a question, how many casuals pen-and-paper gamers are out there? While I love Pathfinder or even D&D 5 I know plenty of people that play casual games who's eyes would water just looking at the books and dismiss them as 'not for them'. Of course the hard-core players love these games, and we system wars ourselves to incredible lengths over them - that's just who we are. But those casuals. Who are they? What are they doing now? How do you entice them?

How do you get them to say, "This is cool! I wanna be doing this!"

Or most importantly, "I want to be seen doing this."